Now, just to add more evidence to that conclusion in the most ridiculous way possible, apparently Brussels police just found a mobile phone and USB stick that had belonged to one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks, Brahim Abdeslam. The police had seized the phone and USB stick during a drug raid back in February of 2015... and promptly misplaced them entirely. They were found under a stack of papers. Really.

A cell phone belonging to Paris attacks suicide bomber Brahim Abdeslam that had been mislaid by Belgian police was found under a pile of documents in a Molenbeek police station, local media reported Tuesday.

Officers seized the phone and a USB stick belonging to Abdeslam during a drugs raid in Brussels in February 2015. Following the November 2015 attacks in Paris, authorities wanted to analyze the phone for details about the terror plot, but it could not be found.

According to local media, the phone was found by chance last week in Molenbeek, the area of Brussels where Abdeslam and others involved in the Paris and Brussels attacks lived.

And yet people want to blame encryption. And, yes, of course police make mistakes and misplace stuff, but perhaps law enforcement should be focused on trying to prevent those kinds of things by being more careful in how they handle evidence before they rush off to blame things like encryption.

This all gets back to a larger point that we've tried to make all along about the whole "going dark" thing: good police detective work will almost always beat out merely breaking into phones. Encryption is useful in protecting messages, but it doesn't hide all activity -- and those who are planning criminal or terrorist attacks quite frequently leave lots of other evidence around. Blaming encryption, rather than law enforcement and intelligence efforts, is a lazy solution. It's a way to cover up for a failure to do their jobs with the already quite powerful tools they have at their disposal.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Malaysian flight MH370 remains a mystery (for now?), but technology that could have answered a lot of questions actually exists -- it just wasn't aboard MH370. There are black boxes that can eject with parachutes and be more easily recovered. Various aircraft monitoring systems and engine monitoring systems can send maintenance signals to satellites, providing significant help to investigators if problems during a flight occur. Despite all these technological advances, it's still pretty easy to get lost in the oceans. Here are just a few links on finding things on the open sea.

from the and-this-explains-everything dept

There's an unintentionally hilarious article over at Reuters claiming that TV execs are positively perplexed over the fact that many fans of the TV show Lost are purposely ignoring a leaked new episode of the show, preferring to wait until its aired on TV. Of course, the article doesn't actually quote any confused TV execs. Instead, it quotes one TV exec at ABC who does seem to understand why fans don't want to watch it until it airs on TV.

But, of course, that doesn't play into the media narrative that fans are greedy downloaders who will just get anything as fast as possible when put online. So, instead, the report has to make it out like it's a "surprise." Perhaps only to those who haven't bothered paying attention to what fans actually want. This, by the way, was why there are better ways to respond to movie/TV show leaks than breaking out the lawyers.